


As I Awaken from the Longest Night

by wynnesome



Category: Iron Man (Comics), Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Childbirth, Epiphanies, Friday Snow Angst, Gen, Homelessness, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Introspection, Iron Man Vol. 1 (1968), Minor Character Death, No Major Character Death, Pregnancy, Revelations (not the biblical kind), Rock Bottom - Freeform, Suicidal Thoughts, Tony Angst, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Angst, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Tears, Tony-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 05:56:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18005138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnesome/pseuds/wynnesome
Summary: Sometimes it takes a brush with death -- and birth -- to find a new reverence for life. For Tony Stark, millionaire-industrialist-playboy-inventor turned homeless, friendless alcoholic -- that includes, above all, his own.The snow spins, his breath swirls, shapes flicker in the air, vectors and radii sparkling along nearly invisible curves that tease of something behind them, a glimpse of the hidden order that governs all things. He held pieces of that, once, directed its flow through transistors and circuits, and it feels like he could reach out and take hold of it now, halt one quavering, glittering fragment stationary in its path, to peruse, examine, see into its secrets. But he’s long past grasping secrets or reaching for greater things, things he knows weren’t meant for him, no matter what kind of pride he had before, back when he thought he was someone else.





	As I Awaken from the Longest Night

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based upon Iron Man #182, particularly pp7-14, with dialogue from those pages both quoted and paraphrased. I have also paraphrased several lines of dialogue from Iron Man #167, p21 (Indries Moomji), and from Iron Man #313, pp6-7 (Howard Stark).
> 
> Title is from “Surrounded,” by Dream Theater (Images and Words, ATCO Records, 1992)  
> After having some trouble thinking of a suitable title, [this snippet of lyric from a much-loved song](https://dreamtheater.fandom.com/wiki/Surrounded) finally came to my mind. The specific passage the line is from doesn’t particularly relate to the story, but the line itself is literal and perfect, and the song as a whole has themes of desolation and transformation that feel befitting to me as a source for the title.
> 
> HUGE thanks to my beta-readers, [Veldeia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veldeia) and [Antrodemus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antrodemus). The opportunity to hear your impressions and reactions, and to question and discuss my trouble-spots, before stamping this “finished," was invaluable. And special thanks to [Lore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily) for the detailed discussion of past perfect tense usage. I don’t often have grammar questions, but when I do… This fic is a stronger piece of work for the contributions of all three of you, and I tender my greatest appreciation.
> 
> Supplementary Warnings: I do not believe this story warrants the “graphic depictions of violence” tag, and the physical privations in the story are wreaked by nature upon humans, not humans upon other humans. However, the story does emphasize some harsh aspects of homeless people trying to survive in a blizzard, and of childbirth taking place under those circumstances. There are raw descriptions of pain and distress, and of messy bodily functions. A character has also decided to use the weather essentially as a passive means of suicide. This does not come about. There is no major character death in the fic, just as in the canon it references. I’ve ended the fic at a point slightly before it would be explicitly shown that the character survives, but despite any possible ambiguous interpretations, I have written my ending to carry the implication that events will unfold as they do in canon, with the character surviving and recovering.

“Wha’ can you give me for this?”

“Ten bucks, tops, take it or leave it.”  
  
“I’ll take it.”

The pawnbroker’s advice to get a room instead of a bottle for the night is what he leaves in the shop, along with the warmth of the indoors, and his coat.

The coat, he’d considered for a minute before he walked in. Well, no, he hadn’t. There had… never really been anything to consider, any decision to make. He’d been warned about the weather, already knew he had a cold, cold night ahead of him, either way, and what’s in that bottle will keep him warmer than a tattered overcoat or anything else could. Warm him from the inside, more effective. _Science._

“Had it all, didn’t I,” he mumbles to himself, words whisked away by the wind-whipped swish of the falling flakes. He thinks about everything he’d been, before. “Millionaire, industrialist, playboy, inventor -- hero, even. I can’t forget hero, can I? Admired by men, loved by women, and none of it meant as much to me -- as this.”

No one to clink glasses with -- _Gretl,_ his heart pangs; even if she doesn’t want him around anymore, he desperately wants to know she’s ok -- no glasses for that matter, so he cracks the cap and toasts himself with the bottle: _to what he used to be and what he’s become_ \-- only it was what he’d always been, always trying so hard and coming up short, never enough for what everyone needed of him _\--_ and takes a drink. Warmth hits, ahh, and the sweet, sharp wash of comfort and haze.

“But I didn’t realize that until it was too late, so I’m stumbling around as lost as any man ever was, with no one to search for me... no hope that I can be found…”

His lips are chapped and tingling, and he’s not sure whether or not he’s still speaking aloud. He can hear himself just fine, either way.

It’s cold.

He takes another swallow.

He doesn’t see a way through this one, but that’s ok. Cause to celebrate, even. There’s no one left to need anything from him now; no one counting on him for anything, not anymore. He’s free, and whatever happens to him, there’s no one left for it to hurt.

No SI, no employees to depend on him -- oughta send that son of a bitch Stane a thank-you for just that much, but even if he had a stamp ( _pen, paper, envelope…)_ , the mail might not go through in this weather…

No Avengers -- thank Rhodey for seeing to that one, his best friend, none could be better. So glad Rhodey’s the same size as him to wear the armor, and a bigger man and a better hero everywhere else it matters...

No friends left -- they’d all turned away, and it was only fair, when he’d shown them the truth, that he’d choose a drink over being there for any of them. Even Gretl -- _find her, wish I could find her_ \-- had hoofed it once she found out he couldn’t follow through on his promises. He’d tried, he’d always tried _so_ _hard_ , but that never did count for much.

He stops in an alley, facing the wall, and nestles his bottle into the snow. _His own personal ice bucket -- classy_. It’s cold enough to make him suck in a breath and try to brace for it before he unzips, and his shriveled dick, limp between his fingers, is practically shrinking back inside his fly as he lets his hot stream well out. Too thick and yellow, most of it melts itself a little pit where it makes it to the ground at his feet. At the end, it loses its arc, and he dribbles the last few drops onto his pants.

Hurriedly, he shakes off and tucks away. It isn’t like he could stink any worse, and he doesn't much mind the idea that he’s pissing on Stane's once-fine suit.

Picks up his bottle and shambles on.

The snow spins, his breath swirls, shapes flicker in the air, vectors and radii sparkling along nearly invisible curves that tease of something behind them, a glimpse of the hidden order that governs all things. He held pieces of that, once, directed its flow through transistors and circuits -- _inventions he always intended in the service of life, little as that counted for, either_ \-- and it feels like he could reach out and take hold of it now, halt one quavering, glittering fragment stationary in its path, to peruse, examine, see into its secrets. Hummingbird-quick, it would vibrate in his hands, anxious and trembling in eagerness to be on its way, to return to its place in the whole. He wouldn’t deny it, wouldn’t detain it for long…

Wouldn’t at all -- he stumbles over something buried by the snow, a dull shock to a distant extremity. His feet feel far away, like they, in turn, don’t quite know where the ground is, but they find it again, close enough, and he doesn’t fall.

His hands are so cold, almost numb, raw and scoured, swollen knuckles and fingers reduced to crude, poorly articulated mechanics that would never have passed muster in his shop. _Fit for the scrap heap..._ Drunken abstractions slide away like the quick fade of dreams when it takes all his focus to keep something more tangible and far more vital in his clumsy grip. He’d have let his face plant in the sidewalk before letting a drop of lifeblood spill from his precious bottle, he knows, and he’s long past grasping secrets or reaching for greater things, things he knows weren’t meant for him, no matter what kind of pride he had before, back when he thought he was someone else.

He should... probably take a seat. There, right under that window, perfect, they saved one for him. Best seat in the house, just like old times. _VIP_.

Stiff and brittle and shivering, he lowers himself, hunkers down, gets the points of his seatbones arranged as tolerably as he can against the snow-covered concrete, and pulls his knees up. Every movement is painstaking, slow and sluggish, where he used to be so _fast_ , everything accelerated -- mind, heart, machines...

He’d felt even faster with the first drink, the first bottle, the first month, when he’d still been flying. And then it’d all started slowing, throttling down to the agonizing crawl the minutes and hours have become. Maybe just a last-ditch effort of a dying mind to stretch things out, make it feel like there’s more time left, more time he doesn’t want anymore, doesn’t deserve.

Once he’s down, the butt of his pants is soaked through almost instantly. With little spare flesh on him these days, always lean anyway, and much of his muscle depleted,  it just makes it easier to fold himself into a tighter ball.

Drunkard’s diet, he’d taken right to it. Eating less meant more coin to buy drink and not as much to soak it up -- more bang for more bottles, and well worth the gnawing teeth of hunger. He had a meal plate at the shelter sometime… yesterday… He’d had a belt sometime further back, crumbling old leather thing, but after a while, had bartered it away and just chopped another buttonhole in the waistband of the pants, instead.

It’s cold, so cold, and he doesn’t think, he _doesn’t_ , banishes them, the thoughts of crackling fireplaces and bubble-jetting jacuzzis, steaming soup and bottomless pots of coffee, of savory smells, and sunshine, and embraces, being wrapped up in arms besides his own, banded around his torso as tight as he can, hard enough to feel the pinch and pull in his shoulders. This cold is like a straitjacket, cranking down on him till his joints creak. Like rigor, setting in a little early. He’s hoping for the part where it doesn’t hurt, at the end.

And there it is, the danger in those thoughts -- for a moment, he almost forgot, he’s got all the warmth he needs, bottled up right here.

For as long as he can make it last. Which he knows, won’t be till morning.

He did lie to himself, a little. There _was_ something he’d considered, after all, when he chose his last transactions. Ten dollars could have had him a bottle and a bed, both -- but he hadn’t lied to the liquor store clerk: _What’cha gonna celebrate? ...I’m celebrating the end..._

And that’s it. He couldn’t see a way through because all he’d wanted to leave himself was the way out.

He’s ready for it. Freezing, drunk, hurting all over, and heartsick with self-hatred, he’s ready -- to let the maddening slowness tick down to its final stop, and let nature take its course. They’ll find him with the new day that may as well be decades from now -- the blond officer with the drunk for a dad -- _like Steve_ \-- find him frozen in the morning, and he might thaw, but he won’t wake. He’s no Cap. Just another wino, pally, that’s the truth, that’s what he is.

Ready to be done.

_I guess I’m dying. I guess it doesn’t matter. I guess I don’t care…_

_...because if I could do what I’ve done -- if I could help this sickness I’ve got destroy me -- then I’m not worth saving -- then life has no meaning anyway._

“Tony?”

He thinks he must be imagining it at first, just a trick of his mind, conjuring up the last friendly voice he’d heard speak his name, another mocking memory of warmth.

“I been lookin’ all over for ya.”

He lifts his chin an inch, blinks snowflakes from bleary eyes. The outline that approaches takes a shape he’d frantically sought, and despite an acknowledged measure of self-delusion, he’s sure he isn’t so far removed from reality as to be hallucinating.

“It’s me, Gretl! You gotta help me, Tones! I’m gonna have my baby!”

He’s flooded with relief. She’s really here. She’s come back, and she needs him. _Come back_ because _she needs him, of course…_  

His eyes follow her gesture toward the dark stain at the front of her jeans. “My water’s broke -- it’s comin’ any minute now.”  
  
_Water breaking_ … it rings a bell, but only vaguely.

The details don’t matter. For him, it means he’s not done yet. Someone still needs something from him. He’s deeply grateful, darkly bitter. He squashes both.

It’s harder -- slower, shakier, _colder,_ with more wet surface area now for the wind to slice -- to stand back up than it’d been to sit, but he manages it. Manages that, and the pretense that his arms around Gretl are helping offer her any measure of support, when it’s more like the other way around. She’s huddled against him like that embrace he’d pipe-dreamed a few minutes ago, but of the two of them, he thinks he’s leaning harder.

A horrible irony resounds in his head. Why _now_ , when he’s got less than nothing left to give? Why _now_ , when she’d left him before, with curses on her lips for his false, failed promises, calling his care a lie the moment he’d found himself no longer a man of means? Why can’t she just let him _go_?

Doesn’t matter. There is need.

“We’ll get you to a hospital--”

“Naw, St. Vincent’s is the closest, an’ that’s ten blocks, an’ we’d never make it in this storm.”

He pulls himself away and lurches toward the street. “I’ll get a cab.”

“In the snow? Lookin’ like you do? Sure you will, Tones.”

...and not a penny to his name, and cab drivers aren’t known for their charity…

 _Where is your worth, Tony Stark?_ He hears Indries’ scathing contempt. _In your bank account, certainly no place else..._

Right. Useless. Lies and empty promises. He doesn’t need the reminder but the derision, that he deserves. He used to think he knew how to fix things. He should know better by now.

Gretl isn’t Indries, though. His futility isn’t her fault. He’s still here. He’ll still try.

“What _can_ I do?”

“There… the doorway.” She points to a red-brick building across the way, where a stairwell is tucked into an open-fronted alcove. “Get me outta the wind.”

Ah, she knows what she needs from him. That’s good, she can just guide him along and take it. _Don’t they always?_

Hunched together and buffeted, they stagger across the street, sink down onto the stairs, his back to one of the side walls. The roughness of the stone drills into every knob of his spine, and his tailbone is a jagged rock he can’t get out of sitting on.

Gretl clings to his chest, on her knees between his spread, bent legs. “Little warmer, anyway,” she says with a faint smile.

It’s stiller and quieter in here, at least, and she’s incongruously freezing and so frighteningly hot, the life-warm bulk of her belly bulging against him, that he’s ashamed to be finding a shred of relief in it. The contrast from his back to front is extreme enough that it’s starting to confuse his senses, hot and cold beginning to switch and swap, freeze and burn interchanging, but unrelenting no matter which way they flip. Branches in the winter, twigs on a fire; he’s waiting for his body to crack open at any instant, for wind-scoured skin to split, bones to snap and splinter. Camels and straws, calculations for stress. _Maximum load exceeded._

Gretl’s eyes fall closed, and her head to his shoulder. He held her, the way he’s always known how to hold a woman, when they flopped together weeks ago, but somehow he’s forgotten the simplest things in the world, like where to put his hands. Hand, anyway. One’s still taken up with guarding his grail. He ends up wrapping the other under the angle of his thigh, and eventually lets it migrate to her shoulder, fingers sinking into the grubby fleece of her jacket, and then to the back of her head, the matted pile of her hair.

He hasn’t, though, forgotten how to act the gentleman, or the fellowship of the bottle. He offers, and can’t believe she turns down a drink. If there were ever a time… No hospital, no doctors or drugs, and she’s refusing the most perfect anaesthesia that ever did stop the pain.

Wouldn’t have known she was still on top of it enough to choose going without, and he doesn’t have a dollar to offer her, much less a fifty, for sticking to her guns. Better off than he is, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t surprise him. He’s always been awed by the strength of the women he’s known.

 _Naw… not now. I don’t want the kid to be born drunk..._ Even if that sounds to him like a fine principle that’s also too little and far too late, well, who’s he to judge? He knows how far down the hole he is now. And he knows he’s a weak-willed man.

Not that she’s asking him to; quite the opposite -- _you look like you could use some --_ but he certainly won’t be abstaining on her account. Couldn’t stay sober twelve hours and earn that fifty again to save his life. Good thing he isn’t trying, on either count.

The good stuff, served deeply chilled, gurgles its way down, a rivulet of meltwater flowing through a fissure in solid ice. Bliss flares down his throat and up through his sinuses, softening and blurring the vicious bite of cold and the unforgiving concrete. It spreads, inflates and cushions every miserable, painful place in his body, takes him to the good place again, the halfway place where he’s looking as much inward as out, seeing the images in his mind’s eye as clearly, or moreso, than what’s in front of him. Like dreaming, without it mattering if his eyes are open.

Gretl’s still murmuring softly against him, her voice gone somber and sad, echoing his own earlier realization that there’s no one coming for them -- _there ain’t gonna be any rescue_. A wisp of guilt flutters through him as she looks up at him, then, with eyes too blue and earnest to bear. _He knows eyes like those…_

“What you thinkin’ about, Tones,” she asks. He averts and shutters his own. How can he… he can’t, can’t possibly tell her that the thing that’s sapped her hope is what will be his own salvation.

So he rambles, falling into the first subject that comes readily to mind. “Armor. Armor I used to wear, that I thought made me invincible…” Unsure from there again how much he speaks aloud or if or when he trails off inaudible to chase his thoughts in silence, he deliberates on armor and shells -- _Shellhead, how it used to be a term of affection, a badge of approval_ \-- and containment, and prisons. How he used to think Iron Man was the best of himself, a place he could set aside and fly away from his public, human foibles, his pathetic, poor little rich boy privilege, and do some good, be something greater.

He’d never been enough to fulfill that as one man, much less two, and one of them meant to be a hero. The hypocrisy had weighed heavier every day, till he couldn’t face himself or his friends, and he wasn’t permitted to scream or cry, except in his armored privacy.

But Iron Man was just another suit, and with him inside, as hollow as he was. A shell inside a shell, a shell inside a cell, a lonely kind of hell he’d locked himself into...

The height of his genius, and how was that what he’d designed?

An endless circle where protecting himself from the world became protecting the world from himself, where untouchable ran both ways, and his escape became inescapable.

So every day, he’d screamed, and cried, and parts of him had died, sealed away inside his self-built, solitary confinement.

And tonight. Tonight, he has one last bottle to hurry things along, kickstart time back out of its torturous slowdown -- and he’ll be killing off the last of it.

Gretl shifts and moans, the rhythm of her breaths disrupted, their tiny puffs of heat trading one grimy patch of his neck for another.

“Tones… It’s hurtin’... hurtin’ a lot…”

It is.  

He nods his agreement, and regrets it when it sets off the headache that’s taken to squatting in his eye sockets and the base of his skull.

Not just his head. Every part of his body aches without stopping. It’s become a constant, the sting and smart of his exposed skin, the paradoxical coal-fires pulsing in all his joints like dull hammer strokes.

Even moderately sheltered, the wind still cuts, and there’s no division anymore between pain and cold, just the cruel composite of both that feels like it’s fusing his bones.

Part of him’s starting to regret the coat now, even though he knows one more thin layer would barely be a placebo against this storm. No, he did the right thing. He has in its stead the perfect lubricant, the high-performance antifreeze that can flush him right out, get him free-flowing again.

He splashes a swig into his mouth, and another, and even that hurts, burns his cracked lips and makes his nose run, adding to the crust around his scabby nostrils and on his cuff when he smears his wrist across to catch it. The bottle tilts at what would have been a dangerous angle an hour ago, but it’s only half full now, its diminishing contents safely contained behind dully gleaming green glass.

Everything swims a few strokes away, and he lets himself float, feels the inside of his head grow pendulous, non-Euclidean, all the unbearably hard corners becoming something he can warp and bend around. Excellent shock absorber, fluid dynamics. _See, he still knows his stuff_.

“I’m scared, Tony. I’m really scared…” Gretl’s voice is small and plaintive, and fat tears are damming up and breaking over her lower lids, salt water, buoyant.

A bilious wave of disgust rises, rippling up from the gnarled pit of his stomach. He swallows it back thickly. Look at him, still hiding in his self-absorbed stupor, still running away, fleeing back to the armor that still occupies his mind, offering nothing at all to help distract or ease the distress for this poor woman.

He’s too miserly and stingy, too _scared_ to even make the attempt, when he’s out of reserves and she’s rejected the last thing of value he possesses, and any iota of comfort would have to come from somewhere inside himself, where the last remnants of worth have long since been drowned by the liquor. All of him, reduced to pain, emptiness, and ice.

**______**

_Any minute now_ , she’d said when she found him. For all his esoteric fields of knowledge, pregnancy and childbirth are not things he knows much about, but he doesn’t think it happens like that. He’s almost certain tonight is going to be a long, slow torment for her, too, but with hers inching toward a beginning and his toward an end, he can’t find any real solidarity in it.

Still, she seems convinced that something is becoming more imminent, and if he squints through his glazed-over memory, he can reconstruct a fuzzy, half-formed pattern: short episodes of restless motion, her hitching breaths lapsing into long sighs at what must have been breaks in the... labor pains? Are these contractions yet?  

She’s doing it now, rocking against him, turning, fidgeting her shoulders side-on into his collarbones, dipping her head and muffling her choppy whines into his shirt front, her fingers releasing and resuming their fretting around his arms and shoulders.

When he tries to steady her against him, she brushes his hand away, seems to want to hold on without him returning it, so all he can do is sit and stay it out as her agitations push him against the rough wall from one angle and then another. At least he can give her a slightly softer surface to move against.

An insistent prickle draws at the corners of his mouth and eyes. He’s glad, but at the same time, he wants to cry. How is he still _doing_ this, the same things he used to do in the damned armor, can’t seem to be rid of it, using his body as a buffer, directing threat, danger, harm, onto himself to any degree he’s able, toughing out the wear and tear and wounds, and here too, there’s never been a choice, never a decision to be made.

He chases it all down with another burning sip, another blistering swallow, and one more slug, like a punch to the gut, for good measure. That turns the buzz up a notch and knocks the pain back another, to almost bearable, but the drink has become more a damper, and less a mute, and he’s getting really scared, too, his own crippling fears filtering through. He’s gotta get out of his mind, and his body has never been a great place to inhabit, either, and he drinks so he doesn’t have to feel these things, so why, _why isn’t he_ numb _yet_?

A line pulls taut across the bridge of his nose, and the tears still threaten. He squeezes his eyes closed, doesn’t find any answers in the false colors, opens them back up and squeezes his palm around the bottle to check his half-insensate hold on the only dwindling answers he does have left.

Gretl bolts upright, wild eyes overbright and downturned mouth weary.

He’s been lost in his head again.

“Tony! I-it’s starting!”

Her face twists, wringing more tears out and down her cheeks -- _naturally,_ she’s _allowed to cry_ \-- but it’s ugly of him to begrudge, and he can see, it’s obvious, when the first big contraction wracks her. She groans long and hard. The hand not splayed over her belly claw-grips at his wrist, digging into tendons that wake shrieking from the dead, and his nerves spasm, and _NO, oh God, NO,_ he wordlessly wails behind gritted teeth, feeling his tenuous grip give out, his fingers involuntarily release, and in the slowest motion yet, his bottle falls, clangs over the edge of one stair and upends down to the next, spilling after itself in crooked trails. Gretl’s clutching at him, sobbing, and she’s blocking up the space between his knees so he can’t even scramble, cold be damned, to scoop up the whiskey-infused snow, collect and shove it in his mouth, a last desperate act of salvage denied--

It’s too late.

He’s in shock.

\-- _it's ok it's ok it's ok_ , his panicked mind is reeling off, gibbering frantically over and over again, but it’s not, it’s _not_ , it’s _NOT--_

\--it’s his life before his eyes, looking down from an immeasurable distance at his own body lying cracked and broken, bleeding out on that stair--

He’s split in two.

The terror-crazed half of his brain pours out tempestuous promises, tells him there’s plenty still swimming in his blood to get him through -- _just a few more hours to hang on… a little longer and it won’t hurt anymore… the last time you’ll ever have to hold yourself together…wait it out, that’s all, the only thing left, nothing else required of you, and it’ll be over, finished, done._

The lucid part, the fine-print part, the one on the other shoulder -- _would that be angel or devil, how would he know the difference anymore?_ \-- dispassionately asserts that his mute button, his placebo, his time-speeding talisman, is gone, he’s already drying out, and everything is only going to get much, much worse before that blessed end.

Dread fills him, tar-black and dense.

The voices shout and circle, his and hers, around and under and over. He keeps getting lost in his head. He doesn’t know how long it is, minutes, seconds, one, some, few…

...but Gretl has ridden out this round, weeping quietly, bravely sniffling back her tears.

Sweat, actual _sweat_ , has broken out at her brow, temples, upper lip, and Tony is suddenly, irrationally, hotly angry, savagely jealous of the labor she has to heat her. It skids and sparks, sweeping through all his emotions, crashing around, careening out of control, and finally, he’s broiling with it.

He wants so badly to hate, to keep his blood boiling with venom and rage -- if he can’t have what he really thirsts for, then, _please, at least_ _this_ \-- but it turns back on him almost immediately. His chest quakes and he’s biting back a sob of his own, despising himself as much as he ever has.

Compassion, always his deadly, compelling siren song.

He’s beyond saving, and glad of it, but that doesn’t mean the same has to be true for her. He’ll do -- keep doing -- what he’s always done. Anything he can. Finding, _making_ something, when it seems like there isn’t anything left within his power--

He stops himself short there. Intentions, intentions and pride, his most worthless currencies. He’s so completely at a loss. Out of his league, out of reach of all his resources, connections, data, research, even clear thought. It’s getting harder to concentrate.

What on earth is he supposed to do here, how the _hell_ is he supposed to help her? There’s… some kind of special breathing, isn’t there, but he’s never had occasion to learn anything about it, and he _doesn’t know what to do._

He’s coming up empty.

_...worthless… useless..._

He tries to think of soothing things and tries to say them, takes her hands between his and chafes, rubbing circles till it’s helped as much as it hurts, or so he hopes, and they both have a little feeling back.

 _Losing battle_ , he thinks, but it passes some time and then another one hits, and she’s grimacing, grasping at her belly again, and huffing out her breath in whimpers that fan into white plumes.

He’s more aware this time, and thinks it lasts around a minute, give or take, before the bowstring tension falls away, and she sags, trembling, and teeth chattering.

About as much as he knows is they’re only going to come more often, longer and more intense. It’s already taking its toll; he can see the signs in her blue-tinged, waxy skin, the quick flutter her breathing settles back to, shallow, with an ominous rasp behind it. He’s starting to wonder how she’s going to do this all night. Hasn’t _stopped_ wondering how he is.

He needs a drink, he needs a _drink_ ; the anger still bubbles, and everything still circles, the clamoring voices, his hands on her shoulders, dizzying and ineffectual, and how is he supposed to do this with _nothing left to drink_? It doesn’t really matter. There’s no _how_ , just the hard fact that whatever’s to come, they’ll both be facing it unmedicated.

**_____**

Hours pass.

Distorted by the hounding cold and pain, his sense of time can’t be any more reliable than any of his other perceptions at this point, but hours, it has to be.

Through the doorframe of their narrow alcove, there’s the long, slow greying till darkness falls, watching the snow pile ever higher, till the carcass of the old green sedan parked at the curb is half buried.

And the continuing crawl of time through all her intervals since.

Nature has no cause to hurry.

He tries to keep count, how many, how long, during and between -- _data points, old habits_ \-- but loses track.

Sometimes they count together, meaningless integers with no units, but it seems to calm her a little, give her a focus. Then the contractions get too strong for her to talk through, her face wrenching up, her hands wringing bloodless stripes on his wrists, and her breath coming in wretched grunts that beat in and out of time with his numbers.

Cold comforts.

The wind has picked up again, an eerie whistle as nagging as white noise, harder to tune out because it changes in pitch and direction.

He tries not to look at the patch of emerald two stairs down, his mined-out mother lode, but if his eyes slide too far left, it catches his attention, and makes him swallow convulsively.

More than once, Gretl struggles -- _up, lemme, gotta get up_ \-- to get up and walk. _Where is it she thinks she’s gonna go…?_ One time, she gets as far as standing, till he and her wobbly legs talk her right back down.

His heart races and flips over and leaves him breathless, taking all the air the wrong direction with it. He doesn’t think he’d be able to stand up to go after her, if she left, or if she fell--

It rolls back into place only once she’s collapsed against him again, swaying and quivering, her hands flailing, playing out her thwarted drive for propulsion.

He understands, truly empathizes. He’s always hated, _abhorred_ , being held back, forced to inaction. He knows what it’s like to feel trapped, done to, by outside forces and his own body alike.

He reverts to the singsongy nonsense, the rubbing of circles. She bruises his hands bearing down through the contractions. The cycle continues. He’s dredging the bottom, still doing his best as an anchor.

Cold, cold comforts.

All he can do is continue. To exist. To endure.  The savage cold, the spearing headache, the terrifying onset of sobriety -- because the end hasn’t come yet.

For either of them.

**______**

Time splits open, lengthens and divides again.

 _Let nature take its course_ , he’d thought earlier.

That’s just what it’s doing, relentless, regardless of approval or permission. He’s staggered by its violence.

He’d had in mind some wholesome process, orderly and clean. He hadn’t fathomed the enormity of the euphemism.

The storm. Gretl’s labor. His own protracted shutdown -- none of these are smooth or soft. There’s no glimmering of gentleness.

This is brutal. Jagged glass and unsheathed claws; snarling chaos; turbulence.

An intractable unmaking.

**______**

Pain is its own exertion, and if he feels the icy air slashing sickles through his chest at every breath, how must it be for Gretl, panting and gasping her way through the contractions that seize her body ever more acutely, with barely a rest between them now?  

She’s sweating profusely, but even if she’s warm -- even with the bruising in his bones, his skin long numb and yet continuously burning in the scraps of wind that snap and slither through their doorway -- he’s no longer envious.

The night stretches on. She’s winding up and he’s winding down.

Time expands and unfurls, in the cycles and the circles.

With every trip around, there’s less and less stillness between the thrashing and the screaming herself hoarse. In the moments of respite, she fights to catch her breath, unclamps her fingers from her deathgrip on his wrist, and with what’s left of her voice, repeats _sorry, sorry,_ over and over, and over his shushing, till he’s nothing but an echo sending _don’t be_ ’s back at her across the void, sick at himself for making her feel she’s the one who owes an apology.

But she’s tugging at his hand, working to push these words out with strength she should be conserving for the baby.

“Don’t try to talk,” he protests. Whatever it is isn’t as important as that.

“Sorry, listen t’me, ‘m sorry for callin’ you a liar--” she scratches out, coarse-grained.

_...but it’d been true…_

“Gretl, no, you don’t have to--” There’s no place in himself to offer a home to forgiveness. It would wither and die like an unfed, unnourished creature.

She jiggles his hand again.

“Yeah, Tones, I do. You gotta listen. I know you don’ love me like all those beautiful ladies--”

His heart plummets, pounding short and quick. He feels like the old days, when he’d waited too long to charge the chest plate, and every breath felt like trying to suck oxygen from a vacuum, and he could almost feel the shrapnel creeping through his vulnerable arteries and veins.

“--but you were here for me, Tones, n’ I’m th’one who ran away. You tried your best and kept on trying, still here tryin’ t’help me now, all the way till th’end.”

This is all wrong. She can’t know of his intentions, to be out of the race by morning. Why is she talking about the end like she’s the one who’s not going to make it? He’s speechless. His mouth is open to make his rebuttal, but nothing’s coming out.

“I just gotta say my thank-yous. You were always nice t’me. Givin’ me respect. You should give yourself more respect, Tones. You’re a good man.”

He’s shaking his head and forming the word with his lips, _no, no_. She doesn’t know the half of it, the things he’s done, the people he’s failed, or she wouldn’t be saying any of this.

Her voice cracks. “You _are_ ,” she repeats, like she can hear every single word he hasn’t gotten out in argument. “Way better’n a washed-up ol’ whore like me deserves.”

It’s a fresh hurt piercing him, to hear her disparage herself this way. Because it’s wrong, and because it hits too close, too much like hearing his own self-scorn spoken aloud. Some shames should be kept sequestered, not commiserated. Part of the penance.

He finds his voice, finally, or at least a thin slice of it. “Don't say that, you’re good, a good woman, Gretl, not a--” He touches her cheek, and isn’t sure if the duck of her head is meant to lean into it or away.

She pats her belly and huffs out a little laugh. “How d’you think I got myself like this, Tones? Had a reg’lar. Said he loved me, told me I should quit the business an’ he’d take me home. Showed up every night for a week, an’ then I never saw’im again.”

Her words are deflating, tapering off, sounding airy and squeezed. “Gullible, stupid me, wasn’t even makin’ him pay.”

She stops speaking and smiles, wan, wistful, with sadness lingering at the corners of her mouth, almost like she’s pitying _him_ for his naivete, or maybe them both, now that she’s a nine months older, wiser woman.

 _Making him pay..._ Tony’s seething. Furious. His ire leaps, makes him feel like right this moment, he could stand up and march straight through the snowstorm to track down the man who misused her that way. Wishes he could put on the armor one more time and cut loose everything he’s got at him. No, not even that, that’s not the impulse striking him. He wouldn’t need the suit for that. He knows how to throw a punch. He’d love to wipe the need for this look off Gretl’s face and carve it into the bastard’s teeth--

“Tony, Tony. _Tones_ …”

He’s grinding his own, he realizes, and clenching his hands into unclosed half-fists, the further his puffed-up fingers will bend.

His mind has wandered again.

His hands -- something’s changed. She’s not holding them anymore. She’s let go completely for the first time in a long span, pushing off and away from him, and fumbling for the fastenings of her jeans. _The baby must really be coming now, oh God, she’s going to have to get undressed, at least partway_ \--

She’s awkward, bottom-heavy and overbalanced, as she lifts her butt from her heels, shoving the pants down her hips with fingers that look as uncoordinated and graceless as his own. She flinches hard when the air hits, instantly laying a bed of pebbles over her skin, and her shivering redoubles. Tony moves to help her resituate herself and--

His mouth snaps into a startled _O_ and a choke catches his throat at the spikes jack-knifing through his hips and knees when he stretches out his legs for her to rest across. After sitting in one position for this long, the extension is excruciating. His hamstrings feel like they’re bolted to his bones, cold steel rods with zero elasticity.

He gulps in air and tries not to let on, till the stabbing sinks back under his skin, and he can straighten his legs the rest of the way.

She’s even more ungainly with her clothing crumpled at mid-calf, worrying her lip between her teeth, and knee-stepping a leg over his.

He stifles another anguished noise as soon as her weight settles on him, starting up a new cold-fire rain zinging over his calves and thighs like a pelting of tiny rubber hailstones, and a heavier, darker throbbing underneath, where his blood is fighting that much harder to circulate.

Behind her lank-hanging hair, its carroty orange desaturated to sepia-tone by the dim light and snow and sweat, he can see her cheeks squinched up round and high and her eyes unnaturally wide. _He hates darkening that blue with disappointment..._ He’s mortified, and she’s gracious enough not to bring up what he can’t change. This is so pitifully inadequate. She should be surrounded by nurses and midwives, temper-foam and clean linens. What he’s got is filthy wool and sharp shins, no padding at all, and even those are damp from the wetness of the snow seeping up through and saturating the fabric. The only thing he’s sparing her is going bare-naked directly on the ground. He’ll try and pretend that’s making any meaningful difference.

He’s not the one who matters, but nevertheless, the repositioning hasn’t done him any favors. Only incited a whole new flux of agony.

Every point of rub and scrape rekindles from smoldering, grey-shrouded ache to shocking white starburst, sharp and blinding. _Black hole, supernova…_

The support of the wall and stair becomes a merciless, corrosive grind, rock and hard place, an implacable rigidity that shouldn’t still contrive to feel like it’s folding in on him, compressing and pushing against him harder and harder. With his legs pinned now, his feet out from under him and stranded in some remote location, he feels trapped, claustrophobic. Cut off at the knees.

He groans in frustration, clenches his jaw, rolls his shoulders in the half-arc he can, and shifts in place from the waist up, begging for a better fit, some position, anything to evade the intransigent right angle. All the movement manages is to send blunt, cramping bolts streaking up his back, stringing his frayed muscles tearingly tight over the rack of his bones.

His turn, now, to be cornered.

It’s no _better_ , only slightly _less worse_ , if he can constrain himself to be still. It goes against his grain, to the extreme. Choosing _not_ to act has never been in his nature. He just never knew when to stop, and isn’t that precisely the problem, exactly what got him here.

He thirsts, desperately. _Water, water, everywhere…_

**______**

Gretl sits slumped, her arms wrapped over her stomach. Her feet press inward against Tony’s hips, with her taken-down clothing bunched below her knees, strapping her ankles at shoulder width like a shackle-chain. He wishes they could leave at least her lower legs that scant protection, but unhappily, he knows it’s going to have to come the rest of the way off.

His hands hover for a moment, unsure in her new nakedness if the boundaries have changed. Or if there ever were any. Is there such thing as decorum, for two lost, homeless drunks, snowbound, about to deliver a baby? If he felt out of his league before, that’s only escalated now. _Want a drink, want a drink_ ; it hasn’t stopped playing on repeat, a whisper that speaks up louder, sometimes reaches a crescendo, but but never fully subsides.

He looks up at her and her eyes are tired, bottom lip still between her teeth, quivering like the rest of her in constant shivers. As gently as he can with hands like crude wood blocks, he draws the jeans and panties -- _soiled, he sees nothing, he says nothing_ \-- the rest of the way down. His palms skimming her calves are cold flesh on cold flesh like uncooked cuts of meat.

His lips and the meaningless reassurances mumbled through them feel just as much like rubber.

On each side, he lifts her foot and tugs off her ratty, sodden sneaker, thankful they’re loose enough, because untying laces would be out of the question at this point. The socks underneath are soaked through, the same as his -- he doubts she can feel her toes any more than he can -- and her jeans are soggy and stiff well up the legs. Right, and then left, he maneuvers them down and off, and works her shoes back onto her feet as if enacting some broken Cinderella story.

He balls up her clothing in his lap, where maybe it won’t get any wetter, then balls up his hands at his mouth and blows on them a few times. The brush of his mustache and beard is sharp-edged, embroidered with a beadwork of tiny ice crystals.

Naked below the waist, now, Gretl is spread open in front of him. In the fringes of the nearby streetlamp that sheds their only light, the shadows mask and soften, but he doesn’t want to look.

Paramours, flings and flames, how many has he undressed in his time?

Between how many pairs of parted thighs, lush or lean, has he lain and knelt, licked, smelled, penetrated, giving and receiving in joyous pleasure acts, rowdy and rambunctious, reverent and serene, sparkling with lust and laughter?

And never has he felt so discomfited, like an interloper, between a woman’s legs. There is no place for him here, not in any way he’s ever been accustomed to belonging, to filling this space.

Hers is already overfull with the life inside her, and he’s nearing empty. This is desperation, not desire. With every trace of eroticism stripped away, he’s a sordid stranger in a land he thought he’d thoroughly mapped.

He’s unhappy with the returning clarity of his thoughts. He doesn’t want to be present, aware, facing things head-on. He wants to be retreating, slipping away. Ignoble, he’s accepted it. He’s so tired. He doesn’t know how to do this. He needs a drink, he craves a drink, with every afflicted cell in his body, he longs for _a drink_. If the devil came to bargain, told him he had to live through one more day in return for bringing down the blissful curtain of drunkenness right this minute, he isn't sure which he'd choose.

It doesn’t matter. There’s no bargain to be made at an empty table.

He can’t reach her shoulders anymore, and she’s still holding around herself, like her jacket firmly over her upper half can help make up for her exposed legs. Even in the near-dark, they’re fishbelly pale. He caps her knees with his palms. She’s so thin, but flabby where he doesn’t expect it, in the saddlebags of her inner thighs, in the slack folds of skin wrinkled in dingy, oblique stripes at the insides of her knees where his thumbs fall, and circle, circle.

He fixes his gaze there instead of looking further down, but still ends up feeling like he’s stealing secrets, intimacies that he shouldn’t be given to know. No right to hers, and only repugnance for his own; he hasn't had his pants down far enough to catch sight of his knees in weeks.

His best guess, she’s had maybe three or four minutes’ respite, but the roughening of her breath sounds like she’s about to be engulfed again.

“How long?” he wonders, knowing she can’t know for sure, but maybe her body’s letting her know, that... women’s intuition, telling her more than he’s privy to, anyway.

“Soon... real… soon, it’s gotta be--” she gasps out, the last word taking off into a sharp climb that stalls out midair, stutters to a deep, falling groan as she’s overcome by the contraction.

She stuffs the back of her hand into her mouth and she’s biting down; he can see the working of her jaw, and even through her jacket, the seismic wave that convulses across her face and the swell of her stomach, as her body heaves, obscenely contorting.

There’s nowhere else to look, now. At the crux of her legs, he sees her agape, opening like a parody of a lover.

Something tumbles uneasily in his stomach. He doesn’t know whether to be sick or utterly amazed. From within her bed of curls, he can see the curve of the baby’s head emerging, forcing itself against a too-small aperture, and oh, there is no possible way, _how is she not going to be ripped apart?_

Tense at his core, he finds himself holding his breath and then blowing it out like he’s pushing along with her, like the effort could be additive between them.

He’s surrounded by shrieking --  the howling wind, her breaking voice, the frenzy in his head.

Here at the end, as it’s been from the beginning through the middle, he’s the next thing to powerless, a captive audience of one, pulled to the stage to unwittingly assist without knowing the secret of the trick.

He feels like an illicit onlooker, unwilling and unwanted, able only to stand by and watch while nature runs its pitiless, punishing course. To bear witness, impotent, as her used, abused body cannibalizes itself to its labor, the consummation of the single, unminded purpose that’s consumed her through every rising and receding wave of pain and wind and storm, and all these interminable, cold, wet, aching hours.

She seizes and screams, claws at her stomach and grabs for his wrist again, crushing down with seemingly inhuman strength, a grind of tendon against bone. He lets out a bellow, the loudest sound he’s made in longer than he can remember. It’s cathartic in the midst of the chaos, like he’s finally an active participant, sending something back into it, riding the wave with her even as it’s plowing them both under, spinning and slamming them around with its unruly, incontestable might.

Her body stretches unimaginably wide, and there’s blood, and the raw, guttural cry tearing out of her throat is so deafeningly loud in the enclosed space that it seems like the whole city should hear. With one hand held immobile, he’s thankful, now, that he’s not holding a bottle -- _had he actually just had that thought?_ \-- because if he were, he wouldn’t have had the other free to corral and catch the huge-headed body that pours out of her, slickly covered in gore and slime, and this, he swears a silent, terrified oath, he _will not drop_.

Everything is suddenly fast along with the slow -- the newborn, hot, squirming and squalling, Gretl’s rapid, wheezing breaths, and his own heart rate, galloping away.

Her head hangs, chin almost to her chest. He wishes he could brush her sweat-soaked hair back, wipe her face clean.

“G-Gretl, it’s over, you d-did it, you have your baby,” he stutters out, lightheaded and shaken, the post-battle adrenaline after a close, close call.

Her lips move in what might be another _sorry_ that doesn’t make it out, might be something else. She lets go of his arm, and he opens and closes stiff, creaky fingers once and again before forming both hands into a basket, snug as he can, and scooping up the baby -- _is he holding too hard?_ \--  not too far, still tied to her.

Mother and child show the same furrowed faces and he’s not sure if hers is elation or pain coming through to the front. A spasm crosses from forehead to lips, and her body surges one last time, disgorging a steaming mess over his legs, smoking hot for an instant before it’s quenched in the frigid air.

The ground drops out and he’s in freefall for a mind-obliterating second -- _what now, what’s wrong, what’s happening to her -- oh, afterbirth. Oh. --_ and he crash-lands back into himself.

She scrabbles for her clothes, dragging them through the muck in his lap, and rooting through for--

What she comes up with in one violently trembling hand drops onto his thighs. Involuntary or intentional, he can’t tell. The _pat_ it makes is barely perceptible.

_...small, red, oblong, less than a finger’s length..._

She’s pointing, and trying to speak again. He can hardly make it out, what’s she--

“...cord, T-Tones, gotta … gotta cut th’c-cord…”

_...pocketknife..._

His eyes flick, bringing him slightly disjointed slideshow images. Hand, lap, baby, cord… _cut the cord, she wants him to…_

She plucks at a section of it, down low, her other arm hugging her clothing to the shrunken mound of her stomach. She’s sitting knock-kneed now, pulling them closer together where her feet are still split at his hips.

_There aren’t enough hands…_

It feels infinitely perilous to shift the baby to a one-sided grip, using his forearm to band the small wriggling body to his shoulder. But that gains him limited mobility from the wrist, and the other arm free. He fishes in his lap for the the knife. It takes him three tries for his nerveless fingers to pry the tiny blade open. He’s shaking so hard with cold, fear, shock, and this coordination seems far beyond him.

With the knife in his fist, he uses the thumb side to nudge the slippery cord into the grip of his other hand, so it’s relatively taut between his hold and hers. He positions the blade.

_...have to hold steady, can’t stop shaking…_

He feels so out of control, deathly petrified he’s going to bungle this, slip up and slice the baby to shreds. His guts are clenching up on nothingness so hard they feel like they’ve turned inside-out.

_...it connects to him, can he feel this, will it hurt him?_

Wouldn’t Gretl know? She wouldn’t have told him to if…

...he can’t panic he can’t panic _why can’t he_ he can’t _there’s no one else--_

 _BREATHE_ , _Stark._ He’d been holding it.

_...innnnnn… ouuuuut…_

Do this.

Wherever she got this knife, she did well, or someone did well by her. The shiny little blade is sharp, and after a couple of clumsy, sawing cuts, the cord falls severed, bloody and oozing from the stump hanging a few inches past his hold. With effort, he’s able to use the heel of his knife hand to shove the trailing end up so it doubles back on itself, and wad it into the other palm.

He’s sure he nicked himself at least once, but really, he barely felt it, and any blood of his own is already mixed in with the rusty residue the cord has left, and it’s the bleeding coming from something attached to the baby that’s got all his alarm bells ringing. He scrunches his hand around the tacky lump as staunchly as he can, hoping, hoping that’ll be some help for it to clot.

 _Take care of your tools… she’ll need this..._ One side then the other, he swipes off the worst of the gunk onto the wrist of his suit sleeve, and then uses the knuckles of that hand as a brace to fold the knife closed, so very much easier than it was to get it open. The indentation the back of the blade leaves in the skin doesn’t fill back in right away.

“Good…” he hears her sigh.

He’s dazed, his vision narrowed to the circle of hand and hand and knife, and Gretl’s moving before he can offer it back, half rolling, half falling off him in a floundering twist. He gropes inside his jacket, lets the knife drop in his shirt pocket -- _safekeeping_ \-- lets out a breath and feels his anxiety shrink back a step when he gets that hand back on the baby, but winces when Gretl cries out, her knees and one hand breaking through the crust that tops the thin snow layer to smack hard against the concrete.

The absence of her weight is like a boulder lifting off his legs and lower spine, something being undammed. A deep sense of decompression and the rushing wash of far-off water-flow are almost all he can feel below the waist. That can’t be a good sign. Except it is, isn’t it? Going dead, isn’t that what he’s been waiting for?

Hands full once again with his precious, precarious bundle, he can’t help her at all now, but she worms over onto her back to jam one leg at a time, shoes and all, into her jeans, and somehow gets herself up to a to a teetering, trembling squat to make the brief crawl and crumple into his side, seeming to have exhausted her last burst of energy.

Behind her, she leaves a swath of bloody snow-smear, with her ratty, stained underwear curled in its midst like the husk of a small, dead beast.

If he had a free hand, he’d shield his eyes. Too private, too poignant, another place he can’t stand to look.

He hauls his legs back in, their lower halves dangling like deadwood, skinny tree trunks toppled from the axed-out notches of his knees. A shoe slips off his heel along the way, but it’s not worth retrieving.

Gretl’s head rests back on his shoulder, and before them, he holds her newborn child, once again cradled in his two hands.

She’s wet all against him from lying in the snow, but it’s not adding appreciably to the running total of cold and damp. Even with her leaning on him, the wall at his back doesn’t seem to abrade as much as before.

From under his chin, her head tips toward her baby, and she reaches out a tremulous hand, trailing lax fingers over tiny, crinkled limbs. He shuffles the baby into the crook of his elbow and takes her hand, cupping and guiding it to lay against the snuffling, red and wrinkled face.

“It’s a boy, Gretl. It’s a little boy.”

“Hey, terrific.” Her smile is pinched, but unmistakable. She shifts her focus to fix on him, so clearly, gravely, weary, but intensely cognizant.

“Tones… take care of him, huh?” her blue, blue eyes beseech. “After all, he’s the only kid I’ll ever have.”

 _Only one I will, too_ , he thinks.

What does he say? What _can_ he say -- what can he _not_ say? The lie to hurt her least, always. In this extremity, should judgment come down harsh for that?

Human kindness, his perennial curse.

He’d made a lie of his entire life, the core of himself, to try to conceal his weakness, his tender heart, and the ruin it rained down.

Maskless now, what’s one more, when the truth can only wound? And with a little luck, this might finally, finally, be his last.

It won’t even be an entire falsehood. Surely there’ll be others to give care. The shelters, the hospital, she can’t be turned away…?

As soon as the storm passes, as soon as the roads are passable… They’ll be ok, they’ll be just fine, they’ll make it through.

He’s helping now. He’ll be here till he’s… not. And… after, she can take his jacket, his shirt, to wrap the little one for warmth. He’ll still be of use. _See, barely even a lie at all..._

He’s not quite selfless enough to struggle out of them just yet, just when the chill is starting to lighten for the first time in hours, here in their little huddle.

In a flash, he sees a picture, some other place and time, a loving, happy family, relaxing in bed on a sleepy  -- _so, so sleepy_ \-- Sunday. Or whatever day of the week, he’s not sure. _Never, not ever, would that have been him._

He’s glad he’s here.

“You got it, I got you,” he murmurs, and she beams up at him like a Madonna.

“Good… good man, Tones, th’best I coulda…” It’s barely a whisper.

She’s gazing up at him and the baby with eyes full of adoration and trust, and she’s radiant, beautiful in a way she’s never been before, an inner light turning her sallow skin and pockmarked features translucent. The mythical glow of the pregnant woman.

 _The dying woman_ , the itch in his hindbrain tells him, too knowing, and wanting to unknow, to deny, what it is he sees: a vessel emptied in its purpose, spent in its cause. The serenity of death, the finish, the completion of the task, the earning of its rest.

All that he’s yearned for.

He’s too tired for envy, resigned to knowing this ending isn’t yet for him. How long, how much longer…? He has no mystical guidance to give him hints.

There is no question, no doubt, the very instant when her slowing ends and she comes to a stop. Her hand goes limp under his, and there is absence where there once was life. She’s gone.

He’s been an agent of death, but never so intimate, so immediate, to feel that ineffable departure, the silent wicking of air, and the candle extinguished.

He lets her hand fall away.

For a crystalline moment, suspended in perfect, soft stillness, he knows peace--

The tumult, outer and inner, crashes down once more, and everything restarts. Everything but.

Bitter tears scald lines of ice down his cheeks.

“You beat me to it, Gretl--”

This is all the wrong way around. She’s earned her rest, but didn’t deserve this end.

Neither does he, no matter his desire.

The need hasn’t come to a close. He still has one last mission she’s left him. One more time, he’ll be the barrier, the buffer, his beaten body the armor, for this infant, this child, the one thing that had given Gretl the strength to turn from her habit in the end.

“--but _you_ won’t die, baby. You won’t. _I promise_.”

Purpose. He has, still, again, a living purpose that he holds now in his two hands, both free because one isn’t holding a bottle--

A bottle. ...bottle, _baby bottle_ , his mind babbles. Little guy must be starving, how soon does a newborn need to be fed? Please, let him not be too late, straight from the start, please…

The one single bottle here is -- _drink up… throw it back… now_ that’s _my boy!_ \-- not the kind that’s fit for a child. His eyes stray again down that stair, briefly, and it draws a bead of saliva thick on the back of his parched tongue, but the taste is sour. It’s lost its appeal, but not its hold on him.

There’s only one way for this to work. If it’s going to. If he’s not to beget one last, prodigious broken promise, lie, and failure on his way out. _Can a baby nurse from a dead woman?_ He shudders at the morbidity. He accepts death, he shouldn’t have to tell himself any lies, but… sleeping. She looks so peaceful, and it’s just. Easier. To pretend her rest is that of sleep.

He just wants to rest, too… He can’t, not yet.

As vulgar as it felt to reach between her legs for the birth, the feeling magnifies in multiples when he opens her coat, clumsily yanks at the buttons of her blouse, no dexterity left for small, precise manipulations; he lost that many hours ago. They pop off and land silently in the snow, and the fabric parts, and he’s between her heavy breasts.

In the depths of that valley, she’s still warm.

It should be moot, but he’s even less sure how to touch her, now. It feels so callous to handle her coldly. Treating her body with care is the only way he has left to show his respect.

He shies from the thought of what they’ll do with his. _Given to science_ , he’d already done that with his life. He can’t remember what his last will might have said. Supposes he’ll probably be identified, eventually, to be buried or burned or whatever ritual his past self-importance had imposed.

She’s beyond it, too, but he settles for as much delicacy as he can muster, barring the base _wrongness_ of a caress to her dead flesh.

It still feels like a violation when he pulls away one dirty bra cup to release her nipple, muddy brown in the murky light, and swollen wide like a teat.

 _She’d want to feed her baby. She asked him to help_. She’s willing. Any permission he needs, she’s already given. He _knows_. With his intellect, he comprehends. The resistance comes from somewhere unevolved, veiled and primal.

He holds the infant’s head to Gretl’s breast. _If there’s some trick to this_ … but he latches on and starts sucking. Something off-balance and jittery eases, and Tony sends out a thought of gratitude to the universe, unfathomed and unformed. The milk must be flowing, because the baby stays there for a while, his tiny mouth pursing, cheeks hollowing and filling. _Something to be said for survival instincts..._

The sucking stops; the heavy head starts to droop alarmingly forward, and the nipple slips free. With nerveless hands, Tony uses the edge of Gretl’s shirt to pat the last few dribbles away from her breast, then tucks her clothing back together, and the baby to his chest, swathed between his shirt and the threadbare lapel of his jacket to share his scant warmth.

The hanging end of the cord brushes his wrist. The bloody mess of afterbirth is still clumped in the vee of his lap. _Cut the cord_ , he thinks, and doesn’t know why. He did that already, didn’t he, and it was scary, and hard, and he doesn’t want to do it again. He’s very tired. He’d like to go to sleep.

Without reason, he’s begun to feel light, unburdened and unbound. A leaden mass has lifted, and he’d been suffocating, but now he’s breathing free.

He’s fought a harrowing battle till the turning of the tide, the shift in momentum when the outcome is assured, and all the rest is cleanup. Been through a grueling ordeal, and he’s out the other side. His uncomprehending relief is so profound that a fresh course of tears comes streaming down to salt the ice. _A seed bud of hope, for a meltoff, a thaw..._

He’s still terribly, keenly cold and sore, but it’s waned, worn into the channel that its roaring blasts have hewn. He’s been excavated, cleared of rubble, cold-cauterized. Compared to the rest of the night, he could almost forget how it hurts. At long last, he’s here, he’s gotten to the good part.

It might be his imagination… no, it’s not, he’s even starting to feel warm again. Just an inkling, a welcome fire on the horizon, banked embers fanning to a pulsing heat that radiates from where he knows his feet to be found, repulsor beams in his benumbed, burning bare hands, and somewhere near his middle, a swaddled, swallowed coal.

It’s good to be warm. It’s making him tired. So very, very tired. He thinks he can go to sleep now. Can he? It feels like it’s time to go to sleep.

He can’t die, but he can rest. He doesn’t need to be awake, just alive. Alive to keep the baby warm, take care of him, he promised, promised Gretl.

He used to be a superhero and try to keep people alive, never counting the cost, even to his own willing death.

This seems nicer.

_...trying to save myself means I can be better at saving someone else…?_

He likes the idea.

He can save more people if he’s alive than if he’s dead. It seems so simple. Like he’s fighting for everyone to win at once.

He feels a splash of heat and wet down his ribs, gets a whiff of sickly-cloying through the cold dulling his sense of smell along with everything else, but doesn’t worry about it too much.

He isn’t worrying about anything too much, anymore.

Everything’s fading, all the blinding, mirror-polished pain softened, muted, silvered steel to tarnished bronze. Darker, it’s getting darker. _Have his eyes been closed?_

The wind has calmed. It’s very quiet.

The slow has scrolled out, spiraled onward and outward around to its furthest reaches.

Even his shivering has slowed, elongated, its oscillation lengthened to a ponderous basso profundo, the long waves many times the span of his body, and taking eternities to pass through.

The deadening in his legs is creeping higher, stealing through him, conducting the warmth, and a soaring sense of euphoria, like he’s regaining his flight.

He’s not really flying. _I must be delirious. Maybe I’m dreaming…_

...or somewhere between, conscious enough to feel the ground, and poor lost Gretl, and the baby at his shoulder, and far enough away that it’s all in panorama, perspective, surrounding him.

He can see it again, now -- the colors and vectors, the phantasms that dance and circle, shimmering behind his eyes -- the pattern, the parts and the whole.

And this is it, that perfect, glittering fragment, come to life and thrumming in both hands, a newly born piece of the beautiful, flawed fabric he’d glimpsed before. There are lives and deaths, and pieces forever winking out and forming anew, endless, mobius circles and cycles, and no piece can be stopped in its place, or split away from its path, only seen along the plot of its motion within the shining order.

Gretl had been a piece, and this infant, and -- _the key turns; the tumblers snick into line; the door swings open_ \--   **_I’m a piece, I have a place, too._ **

Muzzily, he thinks he won’t remember this, come morning. Or, he’ll remember having the dream, but not being the dreamer. Come morning, he’ll be left with the fleeting impression, the afterimage, the glimpse of beauty and truth not to be held, but searched and sought and longed for ever after.

Come morning, they’ll find him -- the blond officer, _Steve_ \-- they’ll melt and chip away the ice, and he’ll wake, to a new future, a new life, to start learning his new place in it.

His eyes flutter open and he pats the baby’s back, ham-handed. _Helluva first night in this world…_ “G’night, little guy, hold on tight and I will for you.” It comes out muttery, half-slurred. _Sing him to sleep, maybe._ He might already be asleep. He’s not crying anymore.

Tony starts up a song under his breath, a lulling tune, _lullaby_. He can only remember the first two lines, and hums them over and over.

His eyes close again. He drifts.

**______**

Outside the stairwell, the sky begins to lighten.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first heavily canon-based fic for 616.
> 
> A few weeks ago, I read the first half of the Iron Man 2nd drinking arc as part of the 616 Steve-Tony Discord server’s book club. Iron Man #182 tells the tale of this fateful, rock-bottom night where Tony is homeless, addicted, and stranded in a massive snowstorm with a fellow homeless alcoholic who is pregnant and about to go into labor. After reading it, my brain insisted that I would read no further until I had written an expanded version.
> 
> I love how this comic is written, in words and pictures, and the story it tells. I didn’t want to change its story. All the anguish and pain are there within its panels and pages. I just wanted to look beneath and between and pull out more -- more of the ordeal, more of the freezing cold and misery, more of the filth and indignity of homelessness, more of the hopelessness of addiction, more of the violence of the storm and of childbirth. More of Tony’s journey from accepting and seeking death, to his revelation and realization of his reason to live. I very much wanted to accompany him through his path to reaching that epiphany in his own moments, where in the comic, it is only after the fact that he explains the conclusion that he came to.
> 
> I’ve joked about writing a fic for this issue feeling like I was committing sacrilege, or desecrating a “sacred text.” I know I don’t need to feel that way, and that I have as much right as anybody to put my reading experience and my emotions into retelling this story, but I very much wanted to do it justice. I don’t know if I have done so, but I have given it my best, with much love.
> 
> I did do some reading about several aspects of labor and childbirth, and discussed the subject and incorporated feedback from one mom who delivered a child in less-than-ideal circumstances. That said, this is still fiction, and while I definitely wanted to include some realistic details, other aspects of childbirth are still condensed or glossed over.


End file.
